openrefine, cluster and edit two datasets - openrefine

i have two datasets. Column A has ids from dataset one, column B, has the data i need to cluster and edit, using the various available algorithms. Dataset 2, has again in the first column, the ids, and in the next column, the data. I need to reconcile, data only from dataset one, against data from the second dataset. What i have done so far, is use one dataset, merge the two, but then openrefine, gives me mixed results, ie messy data that exist only in dataset two, which is not what i want, in the current phase.
I have also investigated Reconcile-csv, but without success, in achieving desired result. Any ideas?

An alternative approach to using the reconciliation approach described by Ettore is to use algorithms similar to the 'key collision' clustering algorithms to create shared keys between the two data sets and then use this to do lookups between the data sets using the 'cross' function.
As an example for Column B in each data set you could 'Add column based on this column' using the GREL:
value.fingerprint()
This creates the same key as is used by the "Fingerprint" clustering method. Lets call the new column 'Column C'
You can then look up between the two projects using the following GREL in Dataset 2:
cells["Column C"].cross("Dataset 1","Column C")
If the values in both Dataset 1 and Dataset 2 would have clustered based on the fingerprint cluster then the lookup between the projects will work
You can also use the phonetic keying algorithms to create match keys in Column C if that works better. What you can't do using this method (as far as I know) is the equivalent of the Nearest Neighbour matching - you'd have to have a reconciliation service with fuzzy matching of some kind, or merge the two data sets, to achieve this.
Owen

Reconcile-CSV is a very good tool, but not very user friendly. You can use as an alternative the free Excel plugin Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel. It's very easy to use, as evidenced by this screencast. One constraint: the two tables to be reconciled must be in Excel table format (select and CTRL + L).
And here is the same procedure with reconcile-csv (the GREL formula used is cell.recon.best.name and comes from here)

Related

Optimising LIKE expressions that start with wildcards

I have a table in a SQL Server database with an address field (ex. 1 Farnham Road, Guildford, Surrey, GU2XFF) which I want to search with a wildcard before and after the search string.
SELECT *
FROM Table
WHERE Address_Field LIKE '%nham%'
I have around 2 million records in this table and I'm finding that queries take anywhere from 5-10s, which isn't ideal. I believe this is because of the preceding wildcard.
I think I'm right in saying that any indexes won't be used for seek operations because of the preceeding wildcard.
Using full text searching and CONTAINS isn't possible because I want to search for the latter parts of words (I know that you could replace the search string for Guil* in the below query and this would return results). Certainly running the following returns no results
SELECT *
FROM Table
WHERE CONTAINS(Address_Field, '"nham"')
Is there any way to optimise queries with preceding wildcards?
Here is one (not really recommended) solution.
Create a table AddressSubstrings. This table would have multiple rows per address and the primary key of table.
When you insert an address into table, insert substrings starting from each position. So, if you want to insert 'abcd', then you would insert:
abcd
bcd
cd
d
along with the unique id of the row in Table. (This can all be done using a trigger.)
Create an index on AddressSubstrings(AddressSubstring).
Then you can phrase your query as:
SELECT *
FROM Table t JOIN
AddressSubstrings ads
ON t.table_id = ads.table_id
WHERE ads.AddressSubstring LIKE 'nham%';
Now there will be a matching row starting with nham. So, like should make use of an index (and a full text index also works).
If you are interesting in the right way to handle this problem, a reasonable place to start is the Postgres documentation. This uses a method similar to the above, but using n-grams. The only problem with n-grams for your particular problem is that they require re-writing the comparison as well as changing the storing.
I can't offer a complete solution to this difficult problem.
But if you're looking to create a suffix search capability, in which, for example, you'd be able to find the row containing HWilson with ilson and the row containing ABC123000654 with 654, here's a suggestion.
WHERE REVERSE(textcolumn) LIKE REVERSE('ilson') + '%'
Of course this isn't sargable the way I wrote it here. But many modern DBMSs, including recent versions of SQL server, allow the definition, and indexing, of computed or virtual columns.
I've deployed this technique, to the delight of end users, in a health-care system with lots of record IDs like ABC123000654.
Not without a serious preparation effort, hwilson1.
At the risk of repeating the obvious - any search path optimisation - leading to the decision whether an index is used, or which type of join operator to use, etc. (independently of which DBMS we're talking about) - works on equality (equal to) or range checking (greater-than and less-than).
With leading wildcards, you're out of luck.
The workaround is a serious preparation effort, as stated up front:
It would boil down to Vertica's text search feature, where that problem is solved. See here:
https://my.vertica.com/docs/8.0.x/HTML/index.htm#Authoring/AdministratorsGuide/Tables/TextSearch/UsingTextSearch.htm
For any other database platform, including MS SQL, you'll have to do that manually.
In a nutshell: It relies on a primary key or unique identifier of the table whose text search you want to optimise.
You create an auxiliary table, whose primary key is the primary key of your base table, plus a sequence number, and a VARCHAR column that will contain a series of substrings of the base table's string you initially searched using wildcards. In an over-simplified way:
If your input table (just showing the columns that matter) is this:
id |the_search_col |other_col
42|The Restaurant at the End of the Universe|Arthur Dent
43|The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy |Ford Prefect
Your auxiliary search table could contain:
id |seq|search_token
42| 1|Restaurant
42| 2|End
42| 3|Universe
43| 1|Hitch-Hiker
43| 2|Guide
43| 3|Galaxy
Normally, you suppress typical "fillers" like articles and prepositions and apostrophe-s , and split into tokens separated by punctuation and white space. For your '%nham%' example, however, you'd probably need to talk to a linguist who has specialised in English morphology to find splitting token candidates .... :-]
You could start by the same technique that I use when I un-pivot a horizontal series of measures without the PIVOT clause, like here:
Pivot sql convert rows to columns
Then, use a combination of, probably nested, CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING() using the index you get from the CROSS JOIN with a series of index integers as described in my post suggested above, and use that very index as the sequence for the auxiliary search table.
Lay an index on search_token and you'll have a very fast access path to a big table.
Not a stroll in the park, I agree, but promising ...
Happy playing -
Marco the Sane

Dynamically execute a transformation against a column at runtime

I have a Pentaho Kettle job that can load data from x number of tables, and put it into target tables with a different schema.
Assume I have table 1, like so:
I want to load this table into a destination table that looks like this:
The columns have been renamed, the order has been changed, and the data has been transformed. The rename, and order is easily managed by using the Select Values step, which can be used within an ETL Metadata Injection step, making it dependent on some configuration values loaded at runtime.
But if I need to perform some transformation logic on some of the columns, based on where they go in the target table, this seems to be less straightforward.
In my example, I want the column "CountryName" to be capitalised, and the column "Rating" to be floored (as in changing the real number to the previous integer value).
While I could do this by just manually adding a transformation to accomplish each, I want my solution to be dynamic, so it could just as easily run the "CountryName" column through a checksum component, or perform a ceiling on "Rating" instead.
I can easily wrap these transformations in another transformation so that they can be parameterised and executed when needed:
But, where I'm having trouble is, when I process a row of data, I need a way to be able to say:
Column "CountryName" should be passed through the Capitalisation transform
Column "Rating" should be passed through the Floor transform
Column(s) "AnythingElse" should be passed through the SomeOther transform
Is there a way to dynamically split out the columns in a row, and execute a different transform on each one, based on some configuration metadata that can be supplied?
Logically, it would be something like this, although I suspect there may be a way to handle it as a loop or some form of dynamic transformation, rather than mapping out a path per column:
Kettle is so flexible that it seems like there must be a way to do this, I'm just struggling to know which components to use and how to do it. Any experts out there have some suggestions?
I'm dealing with some biggish data sets here (hundreds of millions of rows) so reluctant to use Row Normaliser/Denormaliser or writing to file/DB if possible.
Have you considered the Modified Java Script Value step? Start with the Data Grid step, the a Select Values step, then the Modified Java Script Value step. In that step you will transform the value of each column in what you form you want and output that in a file.
That of course requires some Java script knowledge but given your example it seems that the required knowledge is pretty basic.

Openrefine: cross.cell for similar but not identical values

I have two dataset:
one dataset has names of countries, but dirty ones like
Gaule Cisalpine (province romaine)
Gaule belgique
Gaule , Histoire
Gaule
ecc.
the second dataset has two columns with the names of countries (clean) and a code like
Gaule | 1DDF
Is there a way to use cell.cross with value.contains() ? I tried to use reconcile-csv but it didn't work properly (it matches just the exact ones).
I've not been able to think of a great way of doing this, but given the substring you want to match between the two files is always the first thing in the 'messy' string, and if you want to do this in OpenRefine, I can see a way that might work by creating a 'match' column in each project for the cross matching.
In the 'clean' project use 'Add column based on this column' on the 'Country name' column, and in the GREL transform use:
value.fingerprint()
The 'fingerprint' transformation is the same as the one used when doing clustering with key collision/fingerprint and basically I'm just using it here to get rid of any minor differences between country names (like upper/lower case or special characters)
Then in the 'messy' project create a new column based on the dirty 'name of country' column again using the 'Add column based on this column' but in this case use the GREL transform something like:
value.split(/[\s,-\.\(\)]/)[0].fingerprint()
The first part of this "value.split(/[\s,-.()]/)" splits the string into individual words (using space, comma, fullstop, open or closed bracket as a separator). Then the '[0]' takes the first string (so the first word in the cell), then again uses the fingerprint algorithm.
Now you have columns in each of the projects which should match on the exact cell content. You can use this to do the look up between the two projects.
This isn't going to be completely ideal - for example if you have some country names which consist of multiple words it isn't going to work. However you could add some additional key columns to the 'messy' project which use the first 2,3,4 strings etc. rather than just the first one as given here.
e.g.
filter(value.split(/[\s,-\.\(\)]/),v,isNonBlank(v)).get(0,2).join(" ").fingerprint()
filter(value.split(/[\s,-\.\(\)]/),v,isNonBlank(v)).get(0,3).join(" ").fingerprint()
etc. (I've done a bit more work here to make sure blank entries are ignored - it's the get() command that's the key bit for getting the different numbers of words).
I'm guessing that most country names are going to be only a few words long, so it would only be a few columns needed.
I've not been able to come up with a better approach so far. I'll post some more here if I come up with anything else. You could also try asking on the OpenRefine forum https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openrefine

pig - transform data from rows to columns while inserting placeholders for non-existent fields in specific rows

Suppose I have the following flat file on HDFS (let's call this key_value):
1,1,Name,Jack
1,1,Title,Junior Accountant
1,1,Department,Finance
1,1,Supervisor,John
2,1,Title,Vice President
2,1,Name,Ron
2,1,Department,Billing
Here is the output I'm looking for:
(1,1,Department,Finance,Name,Jack,Supervisor,John,Title,Junior Accountant)
(2,1,Department,Billing,Name,Ron,,,Title,Vice President)
In other words, the first two columns form a unique identifier (similar to a composite key in db terminology) and for a given value of this identifier, we want one row in the output (i.e., the last two columns - which are effectively key-value pairs - are condensed onto the same row as long as the identifier is the same). Also notice the nulls in the second row to add placeholders for Supervisor piece that's missing when the unique identifier is (2, 1).
Towards this end, I started putting together this pig script:
data = LOAD 'key_value' USING PigStorage(',') as (i1:int, i2:int, key:chararray, value:chararray);
data_group = GROUP data by (i1, i2);
expected = FOREACH data_group {
sorted = ORDER data BY key, value;
GENERATE FLATTEN(BagToTuple(sorted));
};
dump expected;
The above script gives me the following output:
(1,1,Department,Finance,1,1,Name,Jack,1,1,Supervisor,John,1,1,Title,Junior Accountant)
(2,1,Department,Billing,2,1,Name,Ron,2,1,Title,Vice President)
Notice that the null place holders for missing Supervisor are not represented in the second record (which is expected). If I can get those nulls into place, then it seems just a matter of another projection to get rid of redundant columns (the first two which are replicated multiple times - once per every key value pair).
Short of using a UDF, is there a way to accomplish this in pig using the in-built functions?
UPDATE: As WinnieNicklaus correctly pointed out, the names in the output are redundant. So the output can be condensed to:
(1,1,Finance,Jack,John,Junior Accountant)
(2,1,Billing,Ron,,Vice President)
First of all, let me point out that if for most rows, most of the columns are not filled out, that a better solution IMO would be to use a map. The builtin TOMAP UDF combined with a custom UDF to combine maps would enable you to do this.
I am sure there is a way to solve your original question by computing a list of all possible keys, exploding it out with null values and then throwing away the instances where a non-null value also exists... but this would involve a lot of MR cycles, really ugly code, and I suspect is no better than organizing your data in some other way.
You could also write a UDF to take in a bag of key/value pairs, another bag all possible keys, and generates the tuple you're looking for. That would be clearer and simpler.

Database : best way to model a spreadsheet

I am trying to figure out the best way to model a spreadsheet (from the database point of view), taking into account :
The spreadsheet can contain a variable number of rows.
The spreadsheet can contain a variable number of columns.
Each column can contain one single value, but its type is unknown (integer, date, string).
It has to be easy (and performant) to generate a CSV file containing the data.
I am thinking about something like :
class Cell(models.Model):
column = models.ForeignKey(Column)
row_number = models.IntegerField()
value = models.CharField(max_length=100)
class Column(models.Model):
spreadsheet = models.ForeignKey(Spreadsheet)
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
type = models.CharField(max_length=100)
class Spreadsheet(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
creation_date = models.DateField()
Can you think about a better way to model a spreadsheet ? My approach allows to store the data as a String. I am worried about it being too slow to generate the CSV file.
from a relational viewpoint:
Spreadsheet <-->> Cell : RowId, ColumnId, ValueType, Contents
there is no requirement for row and column to be entities, but you can if you like
Databases aren't designed for this. But you can try a couple of different ways.
The naiive way to do it is to do a version of One Table To Rule Them All. That is, create a giant generic table, all types being (n)varchars, that has enough columns to cover any forseeable spreadsheet. Then, you'll need a second table to store metadata about the first, such as what Column1's spreadsheet column name is, what type it stores (so you can cast in and out), etc. Then you'll need triggers to run against inserts that check the data coming in and the metadata to make sure the data isn't corrupt, etc etc etc. As you can see, this way is a complete and utter cluster. I'd run screaming from it.
The second option is to store your data as XML. Most modern databases have XML data types and some support for xpath within queries. You can also use XSDs to provide some kind of data validation, and xslts to transform that data into CSVs. I'm currently doing something similar with configuration files, and its working out okay so far. No word on performance issues yet, but I'm trusting Knuth on that one.
The first option is probably much easier to search and faster to retrieve data from, but the second is probably more stable and definitely easier to program against.
It's times like this I wish Celko had a SO account.
You may want to study EAV (Entity-attribute-value) data models, as they are trying to solve a similar problem.
Entity-Attribute-Value - Wikipedia
The best solution greatly depends of the way the database will be used. Try to find a couple of top use cases you expect and then decide the design. For example if there is no use case to get the value of a certain cell from database (the data is always loaded at row level, or even in group of rows) then is no need to have a 'cell' stored as such.
That is a good question that calls for many answers, depending how you approach it, I'd love to share an opinion with you.
This topic is one the various we searched about at Zenkit, we even wrote an article about, we'd love your opinion on it: https://zenkit.com/en/blog/spreadsheets-vs-databases/